The Grail of Sir Thomas

Chapter 33

  There was flat steppe ahead, no end to it, not a single bush nor a tree – only low grass, tough and stunted, that had won the struggle for life in the ruthless light of blazing sun!

  Thomas made a step out of the shade of trees, reeled of the heavy torrid heat that came down on him. There were a few clouds, as white as lambs, in the blue sky, but they made no obstacle for the scorching sun to burn the ground. All at once, he got nasty trickles of sweat running down under his armor.

  Oleg glanced over at the forest with fear. “Let’s go… Forest animals can dart out on the edge.”

  Obediently, Thomas limped away from the dark wall of the forest, though it did not seem that scary anymore.

  “Sir Thomas,” the wonderer said reluctantly, “now I know precisely where we are.” His face was depressed.

  Thomas got frightened. “Did Agathyrsians take us back?”

  “Just the opposite. But… they were going east and let us out on the way. Now we are much closer to Rus’ than to Britain.”

  They walked in silence; Oleg kept his hasty pace. Thomas, with his head aching, could hardly get the meaning of his words. “We got closer to my Britain? Or farther from it?”

  “Closer to Rus’,” Oleg replied evasively.

  “So we’ll have to cross your Rus’? At last I shall see which kingdoms it is clutched between!”

  Oleg mended his pace. Thomas could not see his face, wanted to ask more questions, but the enraged sun made his armor red-hot, boiling him in his own sweat so that he felt like a crayfish in an iron pot. He dragged his feet along on the dry yellow grass, hoping he’d live till the halt.

  When the wonderer cried halt, Thomas fell down, as though the ground was kicked from beneath his feet. After a while, he turned onto his side, stretched his aching legs. As Thomas had a look through the blades of grass, he gave a scream and rose to his knees.

  Far ahead, there was a bright gleaming wall… or rather a rampart made of strange orange blocks. The sight of it made Thomas’s heart beat faster. Oleg followed the knight’s look, pointed in another direction indifferently. There was a similar glittering circle of rampart. It could house a huge castle but Thomas doubted whether it did; all he could see was the tall wall sparkling in the sun.

  Oleg gathered some grass blades, thick and knotty, made a fire. Thomas looked with disgust at the two fat lizards that the wonderer had killed by hurling stones. The knight’s hunger made his stomach gripe, but that food was too unchristian!

  “Better a small bug than a hungry mug,” Oleg comforted coolly. “Would you prefer to go without food?”

  “Give me your frog.”

  “No frog. That’s a small crocodile. Do you recall the fare of Agathyrsians? Those were big crocodiles. It’s all the same sort.”

  Thomas ate the lizard up with its skin and claws, then took a stone and waylaid two more stupid ones that came out to bask in the mad torrid sun. He ate one of them raw, to show the wonderer how indifferent the inspired warriors of Christ were to carnivorous joys. The wonderer also ate his one raw, to please either his beastly Pagan habits or his beastly Pagan gods.

  “What land is this?” Thomas asked. He had climbed out of his armor, stripped off, covered his body with clothes to shield him from the burning sun. The touch of a light breeze was blissful to his body; it was all red, like fresh-boiled meat, with jets of overheated air rising over.

  Oleg, with hands behind his head, looked into the sky. He had a dry grass blade in his teeth, a confused ladybird crawling along it. “The beginning of the Steppes.”

  “Steppes… The Wild Field?”

  Oleg turned his head a bit, looked sharply, His voice was biting. “You got the skill to foresee? It will be called the Wild Field, then the Ruin, but now it’s just the Steppes. A pool that keeps – for countless ages, century after century – splashing out strange nations without number, savage, fierce, and blood-thirsty. They bring death, fire, and ruin everywhere but build nothing. They only live by plunder…”

  “Do they?” Thomas doubted. “They have herds, after all. What would they do to the milk, meat, and skins?”

  “They create no material culture,” Oleg corrected himself. “Build no cities nor canals, plant no trees, write no books. Should they take a city, they burn it, with all its temples and libraries. They shatter beautiful statues but make none of their own. The few city dwellers who survive are taken for captives. And we, Rus’, are the shield between the Steppes and Europe!”

  “Is your Rus’ against the Steppes?”

  “Yes. All our life is a struggle against the Steppes. A struggle of plowmen against nomads.”

  “So… we are going to run into the steppe dwellers?”

  “Yes. We are about to enter the lands of Polovtsians – the ones who press on Pechenegs who, in turn, have come to Kiev. But the days of Pechenegs are over. They’ll be crushed between the hammer and the anvil, and Ruses will have an exhausting struggle against Polovtsians. I’m afraid we’ll see their tents soon. But first the numberless herds of their horses. However, first of all comes the swish of their arrows. Polovtsians shoot before they ask any questions.”

  Thomas raised his head a bit, looked around. Within scores of miles, the steppes were empty save the strange orange rings. Perching, Thomas saw two more of those gleaming ramparts on the very brink of sight.

  Oleg also raised his head. “Had enough rest?” he inquired. “Then climb into your irons. We must go!”

  Thomas moaned, crawling on the ground like a squashed turtle. “I’ll memorize it for a lifetime and entrust my grandsons; to fear a Rus saying ‘by chance’, ‘and over’, or ‘we must go’!”

  They made no more than two score steps when Thomas sniffed, glanced over at the wonderer with doubt. Oleg nodded. In several more steps, the smell grew sharp, strangely invigorating, like a sip of cold water in the heat. Oleg cast attentive glances around. Suddenly he sank to his hands, rubbed his belly against the ground, then turned and squirmed on his back. Thomas goggled his eyes. The wonderer made an inviting gesture. “Sir Thomas, please…”

  “What for?”

  “We come into the lands of a strange tribe. They only know their kin by smell.”

  “Like dogs?” Thomas asked with disbelief. “Why should we care?”

  “Dogs mark trees and stones on the borders of their territory, Sir Thomas. For others to know them. A bear on his borders would scratch trees, an elk would strike logs with its hooves, and this tribe does it the same way as dogs. You were right about that.”

  With disgust, Thomas rubbed himself on the stones sprinkled with gleaming yellow drops. He was glad he had armor on, unlike the wonderer. They moved on, across the steppes, heading northeast. Far and wide away, there was Rus’, the civilized kingdoms beyond it, including Germany that was but a step from Britain.

  On the way, Oleg rubbed twice more on the smelly rocks. Once he found some intact drops in a cavity, he collected them carefully into a flask on his belt. Thomas wrinkled his aristocratic nose but said nothing. During the laborious Crusade, he had seen plenty of things, had been both high and low!

  Suddenly they heard a rustle of grass ten steps away, caught a glimpse of something. Oleg did not move an ear, his sword remained on his back, along with the bow and feathered arrows. Thomas relaxed his muscle, started to calm down, but his heart kept pounding very fast, as though it felt a mortal danger.

  After two hundred steps, Thomas glimpsed, out of the corner of his eye, a moving dark point on the left. Soon he made out that it was a killed deer carried by some strange animal in its jaws. The deer’s head and legs were dragged on the ground, catching the grass. Once the branchy antlers got caught in a poor bush. The animal yanked the deer up impatiently, it flew up with the bush in its antlers, the white, shamelessly bared roots made a flash in the sun. The animal seemed to be monstrously strong, though three times smaller than the deer. Thomas shivered, started to pull his sword out.

  “Antes,” Oleg said without s
lowing down his pace. “Never mind them. We are protected by spells.”

  “Spells?”

  “I mean the smell. Do you remember the stones we rubbed on? Let me sprinkle some more on you.” Oleg sprinkled the knight’s gleaming armor with big drops of sharp-smelling liquid, aiming into the slits.

  “Which antes?” Thomas asked, stunned. “I’ve never seen…”

  “Antes… are just antes. We Ruses are antes too. This is what some foreigners call us, for we are numerous and hard-working.”21

  Thomas opened his mouth to ask a new question but remained still, his jaw dropped. The deer was dragged across their way… by a giant ant! He looked like an ingot of black iron, glittering in the sunlight, like a shiny knight, armored from the end of his feeler to the least of his claws. His thick jaws were a steel trap of two jaggy sickles, his prominent unblinking eyes looking in a cold and hostile way, his iron legs moving so easily, as if he carried no prey at all!

  He rushed by, in a score of steps ahead, left an invisible jet of sharp invigorating smell. Thomas followed with dumbfounded eyes the black body that dashed away on its six crooked paws… to the sparkling rampart!

  “The ants of Herodotus22,” Thomas whispered in enchantment. “I thought ‘the father of history’ fibbed…”

  “Fancy that,” Oleg said in surprise. “Have you read Herodotus?”

  “They’ll tear us to pieces,” Thomas whispered again. “Our swords… what are they against their armor?”

  “By chance they won’t. What does Herodotus say of it?”

  “My tutor was retelling it to me. I can’t recall all of it.”

  “Sir Thomas, if we did not run onto this field, we’d have scattered the forest edge with our picked bones! The Dark Forest is not likely to let its prey go that easy.”

  Behind them, there was a whole procession of huge ants, as large as wolves, but clad in the most durable armor, with not a smallest slit to stab a dagger into. They were running in a wolfish way, one by another, each next one touching his predecessor with long supple feelers. Some jerked their antennae up as they ran, felt the air. The ants paid no heed to Thomas and Oleg. But if they retreated, they’d have to fight their way through this live chain. Thomas recalled that even the smallest ants in the lands around his castle would kill ruthlessly the bugs hundred times that large, tear them into pieces, and drag into their anthill to feed their gluttonous posterity.

  “Go on, Sir Thomas,” Oleg said, but Thomas heard no confidence in his voice. The wonderer looked strained as he’d never been before, flinched often. “The smell of the liquid antes use to mark their ways will protect us.”

  “What if it won’t?”

  “Better die of their jaws than of foe’s hand.”

  “That’s right,” Thomas agreed with a heavy sigh. “Animals are innocent and foes will rejoice… Let them not have it!”

  The wonderful rampart was growing with every step. As a small child, Thomas had seen such rings on trodden paths, after rain. The rings were made of white sand, very distinctive against the dark ground; ants were taking the sand out from the depth of earth to rampart their holes, protect against something or somebody.

  The black knightly beasts, in which Thomas did not dare to recognize ants, were coming towards them more and more often. Only by miracle none of them bumped into the men. Suddenly Thomas saw a well-fed badger who climbed heavily out of its dark hollow nearby, scratched its fat belly, trotted across the field. A huge ant was running to intercept it. He was five times that large, with his monstrous sickles of jaws apart. The badger looked soft, unprotected. The colossal jaws should have cut it in two at once, with no effort at all.

  The ant came onto the badger, like a black wind, his metal antennae touched it on the go. The animal squatted and froze. Paying no more heed to him, the ant dashed away. The badger gave a snort of discontent, trotted along the same way, sniffing the puny shoots that stuck out of the dry ground.

  “Badgers… have magic?” Thomas whispered in fear.

  “Hardly they have,” Oleg replied indifferently. “Antes may treat them as pretty birds or fishes. Or badgers may be sacred animals protected by ant gods… I don’t know, Sir Thomas.”

  The yellow wall was growing. Thomas noticed some branchy trees with thick trunks. The closest were sticking out of the gleaming rampart itself, the middle row was shaken with mighty blows of huge golden blocks that often came rolling down from the wall. Only the third row of trees remained intact. In the forestless steppes, they only grew there, around the gold-yellow rampart. Thomas suspected ants had brought selected acorns from the far forest on purpose.

  Oleg started to turn, lest they come straight into the wall, dazzling in the sunlight. At times, black knights emerged on the top of it, with big gleaming boulders in their mandibles. Some of them frowned at the strange creatures, moved their long metal antennae, while others simply unclenched their jaws to let the boulders roll down, jumping on the unevenness. Some stones got stuck. Freshly washed by underground water, they had a special bright glitter.

  One boulder rushed down, jumping, till it rolled into a young oak, which Thomas and Oleg were passing by. The blow made the oak shake, sprinkle sap out of the scratch.

  The sun was sinking slowly to the horizon. The top of the wall blazed with unbearably bright red-orange light. Thomas turned his head anxiously, tried to increase his pace. “No time to leave?” he said in fear.

  “We’ll spend the night here,” Oleg agreed.

  “With these monsters all around?”

  “Would you prefer a way back? The forest is still close… And the lands of this tribe stretch three or four days’ journey around.”

  Thomas glanced back anxiously at the colossal rampart, along which they were walking, jumped away from a boulder that rolled straight toward him. “Well, let’s go. We must go, as you Ruses put it. By chance it will come right!” Oleg was silent and concentrated.

  They walked till the sun was under the skyline and dusk came onto the steppes. With no arrangement, they started to pick up dry branches on the go. Once they had armfuls of those, they halted. At last, Oleg could use his bow; whether the animals were sacred or not, the travelers vowed no fidelity to the ant god. As a sign of respect, they would sacrifice bones and limbs to him. And also feathers if their prey was a bird.

  When the fire blazed up, Thomas clayed the killed monitor lizard and two skinny ducks that had dared to fly over their heads, put them into the coals, sprinkled with hot ashes all over. “Now we have protection! Fire is fire. No animal comes near it. Even antes. They are no men, after all… Are they?”

  “Who knows.” Oleg shrugged. “I heard different opinions on it. I only know antes were created by gods long before humans. Antes lived for millions of years but did something wrong or displeased… Other sorcerers say they failed to fulfill some great plan of the gods… I don’t know, really. I explored other things.”

  “Is there a sorcerer who explores ants?”

  “There is. More than one. Antes are a strange nation; very ancient, very mysterious. They have their own world, own rites and ways. As long as you follow them, no trouble… By the way, these spells are driven out over time. Renew them!”

  Reluctantly, Thomas sprinkled himself, shaking out the last drops. Oleg rubbed the odorous liquid into his bare arms, moistened his hair with it. The smell of ants made a pleasant mix with the odor of roast meat from the fire.

  The sky was going dark slowly, as well as the ground, only the distant ramparts still shone with coarse-grained whiteness. Thomas alerted at every rustle behind them, every move of the shadows. His hand clapped on the sword hilt involuntarily. Ants rushed over trodden paths, and Oleg, as Thomas noticed, had selected a place far from the trampled paths. Ants dragged dry tree trunks in their jaws, carried animals and even birds, others had jaws empty but bellies almost dragging along. Oleg explained obligingly that was the ants’ way to transport mead and water.

  Oleg took the kettle. He went to
where the ants with swollen bellies were running and soon came back with the kettle full of cold spring water. The fire was lighting a small spot. Beyond it, there was darkness, full of scary rustles and moving clots of black. Thomas shrieked when a huge cast head, which looked like an anvil, emerged from the dark suddenly. The supple feelers reached Thomas and started to move, feeling the jets of warmed air. Thomas turned stone when the antennae crawled, with a metal screech, on his armor, touched his legs and chest. Fortunately, the ant caught his visor, it fell down with a clang, screening Thomas’s face from the world. When the ant started to examine the head of strange creature, Thomas just closed his eyes and stopped breathing.

  The ant felt Thomas thoroughly. At times he had doubts and started feeling again, once even grasped a hand with its jaws. With utmost clarity, Thomas realized that if the ant moved them a bit closer, his armor would crack like a quail egg shell!

  Once he dashed away, Thomas breathed out noisily, raised his visor with trembling fingers. “A dragon will be a smaller fright to me!”

  “Don’t make promises you can’t keep,” Oleg warned. “We have to cross the mountains that have more dragons than bats. Dragons are only good in their sleep! And if a dragon is awake… and hungry… And they are almost always hungry…”

  “Sir wonderer, can’t we take another road?”

  “Aren’t you late for your Krizhina? By the way, that ant was very angry.”

  “You know their tongue?” Thomas was surprised.

  “Just a bit of it,” Oleg comforted. “Just the smallest bit!”

  They heard a trample of many hard dry legs in the dark, resonant clicks of sharp claws on the stone.

  Oleg jumped up. “Away from the fire! Fast!” he urged, then splashed the rest of the water out of their small kettle, ran away after Thomas. Half a dozen big ants came from the dark. Thomas made a move to return for his sword, which lay glittering near the fire, but Oleg seized him by the shoulders and held.

  One of the ants all but came running into the fire, wheeled round at once, a strong jet of water gushed out of his swollen belly. They felt a poignant smell of formic acid. Coals hissed, a cloud of steam flew up. Other ants surrounded the fire, turned their bellies to it – some only raised on their forelegs, their bellies tucked up – and spurted at the dying fire from all around. The coals burst with hissing, faded. A cloud of sharp smell went spreading in all directions,

  When the ants left, after having put the fire out, Oleg picked up the kettle, which was half full of formic acid, packed the bag and went into the night. The steppes were only lit by stars and the waning moon. Thomas took the swords and the bow with arrows, hurried after the wonderer who knew the language of black ants, though only the smallest bit of it.

  Oleg made a fire again, a smaller one. Thomas jumped up. “Will they come?”

  “We got far enough away… I hope.”

  “Keep the fire smaller,” Thomas begged. “I don’t like anyone looking over my head! Even if their genealogy is a hundred times as long as mine!”

  The kettle emitted a strong sharp smell. Oleg caught Thomas’s look at it, said comfortingly, “Now we have enough spray for a week! I hope we’ll get out of here before that.”

  “A spray for ants…” Thomas muttered unhappily. “And for dragons?”

  “No spray will do for dragons,” Oleg agreed with great sympathy.

  Thomas glanced at the smelly kettle with disgust. “What are we to cook in?”

  “We’ll pour it into the cup,” Oleg suggested. He met the knight’s perplexed eyes and explained, “The one you have in your bag. Holy Grail, that’s it.”

  Thomas blushed crimson with noble indignation. “Sir wonderer, how can you! That’s a shrine! A relic! Even a wild Pagan should feel…”

  Oleg interrupted, raised both palms as a sign of defeat. “Let’s cook in your helmet then. Agree?”

  “Sir wonderer…”

  “Is it hole-ridden?”

  “No. But it’s a knight’s helmet!”

  “Then let’s pour the formic acid there,” Oleg resolved. “As the kettle is made for boiling fish soup in.”

  Thomas twitched with protest. “That smell will cling to my helmet for lifetime! No, we’d be better to use it for cooking. Lancelot once boiled fish in his helmet, Sir Gawain made porridge in it, and Percival…”

  “And Ares, the god of war,” Oleg interrupted with delight, “once could not go to war because a dove had made a nest in his helmet and laid her eggs. Ares had to wait till her nestlings hatched and learnt to fly! No wars on earth for all that time.”

  “Bloody bird!” Thomas swore with indignation. “To deprive noble knights of their feats? That’s disgusting.” He leaned back, going to lie down, elbowed a big orange stone aside. Suddenly his eyes opened wide, he hastened to roll the boulder close, lifted it with effort on his knees, whispered in a suddenly hoarse voice. “I swear on the blood… of Christ that it is the filthy lucre! Was Herodotus right even about such trifles? I’ll read all of it as soon as I’m back!”

  Oleg kept indifferent silence. Thomas spat on the stone, rubbed it with gauntlet. The yellow glitter grew brighter. Excited, he squatted up, started to break the rock: it turned out to be made of dozens of smaller stones, more than a half of which were bars of heavy porous gold.

  “Pick it with your sword,” Oleg gave a sullen advise. “Ants have sticky saliva… a deadly grip!”

  “Saliva?”

  “Or snot. No, that’s rather saliva, I think. In their depth of earth, they stick small pebbles together while digging their tunnels, lest they have to carry each grain above separately. Though there are lazy ones who carry stones one by one or even run empty.”

  He lay down, tucked his knees up and fell asleep at once, indifferent to anything that ants could drag out of the depths of the earth. However, all the night long he kept hearing in his sleep some puffing sounds, heavy sighs, scuffing, dull pounding. The knight struck with his fists, elbows. Sometimes Oleg seemed to hear Thomas hitting with his head, even flinging himself on the sword hilt to break apart the blocks of gold stuck together.

  All the night Oleg was escaping the thunder. He dreamed of a ferocious battle of gods; Pang shook the earth, Targitai set him in a plow, Peroun hurled thunderbolts. When at dawn he opened his eyes, shivering with cold, Thomas was still breaking huge stone blocks, like a slave in stone quarry. On his right, there was a hill of waste, tall enough for a horse to hide behind, on his left – a bright shining pile of gold nuggets, each no smaller than a fist. The pile of gold reached to the knight’s waist. Behind Thomas, there was a scatter of just-broken stones, with big nuggets still covered with clots of earth.

  Astonished, Oleg turned to the glittering rampart. Anxious, fussy ants were stopping up a breach wide enough to drag the Trojan horse into. One by one, they ran onto the top of the wall, dropped the porous blocks still smelling of underground into the gap.

  Thomas glanced back vacantly, followed the wonderer’s eyes. Suddenly, he moaned, shook his fists in dismal. The new blocks used by ants to close the breach had twice as many gold nuggets in them! The first rays of sun fell on the top on the rampart, giving the gold its teasing glitter; it was so clean, washed, and bright!

  “Ants dig deeply,” Oleg explained patiently. “Even small ones make their holes two or three sazhens23 deep and these big ones can dig in three or four versts! All sorts of things can be found there, unavailable to man.”

  Thomas watched the glaring rampart with grievous doggish eyes, his adam’s apple twitched, as he gulped the saliva of hunger. That miracle was to stand in the steppes up to the autumn, then ruined by winter snowstorms, razed to the ground. The spring would drown the heavy gold in muddy floods, the summer powder it with dust. No one would find the treasure then, unless by a random dig and till he got too deep into the earth. “How often do they come out?”

  “Once they did it every summer,” Oleg replied after he thought for a while. “Old men say so… Then much le
ss frequently. Now these ants are said to come above once in a century. They must have dug themselves too deep! There will come a time when they will get completely hidden from our world; sinister as you call it.”

  Thomas ignored his attack. “Will all the gold stay there?” he cried in anxiety.

  Oleg smiled sadly. “How can ants know what gold is? As they dig, they take up everything that blocks the way: sand, rocks, ore, gold, bones of unknown animals… Hey, aren’t you afraid anymore?”

  Thomas glanced askance at the breach, waved his hand. “Dazzled by the glitter of gold.”

  “At night?”

  “That’s the sort of glitter to retain in full dark, sir wonderer! I saw how a noble knight killed another one, also a crusader, whom he was releasing the Holy Sepulcher with, for a single stone like these!”

  Oleg got up, packed his things, checked his arrows; someone had scattered them at night. There were many tracks of clawed paws around. He found his sword in two score steps, with holes made by spiky jaws on the baldric. Suddenly he went pale, clapped on his chest fussily, as though catching a grasshopper, turned his pockets inside out hastily, slapped his chest again. His eyes became glassy.